The introductory chapter explores the way attention to cities and urban literatures expands the typical nodes of World Literary production. It does so, we argue, by activating not just a broader spatial imaginary or geographical reach for the field, but multiplies the historical and linguistic formations of potential literary world systems. The chapter offers three starting propositions about World Literature: that it seeks literary frameworks beyond the nation; it tends toward systematicity and totality; and it activates an interest in decolonizing literary systems. Given that urban centers are typically highly networked at regional, national and global scales, we then consider the way cities have typically functioned as cultural “switchboards” regarding the commingling of peoples, cultures, goods and ideas. Instead of offering a singular new theory of World Literature to supersede previous ones, our volume proffers accounts of world-connecting circuitry that depends upon the complex dialectics of urban materialities and worldly imaginations.

Scientifically significant phenomena inspire new theories and methods. In this chapter, we use research examples in multicultural psychology (Hong, Morris, Chiu & Benet-Martinez, 2000; Morris, Chiu, & Liu, 2015) to illustrate how cross-cultural phenomena (cultural frame-switching, psychological responses to cultural mixing) inspire new experimental methods in cross-cultural research (cultural priming, bicultural priming, experimental simulation of cultural mixing), which in turn motivate new perspectives to culture and psychology, and give psychology a stronger voice in important intellectual debates related to the cultural effects of globalization. As a result, the psychological science of culture is not limited to constructing abstract categorical representations of cultures from cross-cultural survey data and inferring cultural processes behind the closed doors of experimental laboratories. Instead, psychology is more prepared than ever to make major theoretical and methodological contributions to an expansive and inclusive social science of globalization.